Posts Tagged ‘faked’

The band Guster recently released this video version of their entire album Evermotion. Upon first glance, it may look like a 38-minute video with different album covers displayed statically while the music plays — as is common for this type of video — but look a little closer or watch a little longer and you’ll notice that it’s actually the band sitting (almost) perfectly still to fake the appearance of still photographs.

Photographs like the one above by photographer Shikhei Goh go viral on a fairly regular basis. If the stories are to be believed, given enough patience and a little (or a lot) bit of luck, animals can be captured doing all sorts of amazing things.

According to an analysis published on Weibo, however, the stories can’t (or rather shouldn’t) be believed. Photos like these, the article claims, are staged by photographers who force pet store animals into awkward and unnatural poses. Read more…

Think the above photo is showing a violent protest in the Middle East? Think again. The photo is in fact a screen grab from a video showing just how easily news photos of a ‘violent protest’ could be staged. Read more…

Flip through photographer Michael Jackson‘s “A Child’s Landscape” series, and you’ll find what appear to be vintage photographs of rocky coastlines that were captured with some old photographic process over a century ago. The images are actually modern photographs captured quite recently in Jackson’s studio using rocks in a fish tank.Read more…

Full disclosure: I’ve never done commercial photography and don’t exactly know what goes into making a picture for an advertisement. The only knowledge I have on this subject is the hours of behind the scenes work I’ve watched, the hundreds of magazines, blogs and tutorials I’ve read and, obviously, the billions of ads that have bombarded my ﬁeld of view since the ﬁrst moment I began to comprehend visual information.

When you’re in the process of building a photographic portfolio, you think long and hard about what type of photographer you’d like to be. I’ve read over and over that it’s important to choose a specific area of the business in order to obtain the type of clients you’re looking for. Before I began this research, I was under the impression that I wanted to be a commercial photographer.Read more…

NBC recently received some criticism for distributing the above photo of Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon to several news outlets — some of which used it on their front page — without disclosing that the background and road in the image were fake. Being an entertainment outlet, however, they were granted a pass; the fakery was obvious and it was the news outlet’s job to figure it out and disclose it to their readers.

But one particular newspaper has drawn more fire than the rest. The New York Daily News was one of the papers that used the photo on their front page, but on top of not disclosing the initial fakery, they further ‘shopped the photo and kept that part to themselves as well. Read more…

Want to create a long exposure photo but don’t have a camera that can keep its shutter open for extended periods of time? Mansour Moufid of Elite Raspberries is working on a script called “Hipshot” that can take ordinary video footage and convert it into a faked long exposure still photo. He writes,

Long-exposure photography is a technique to capture dynamic scenes, which produces a contrast between its static and moving elements. Those parts of the scene which were in motion will appear blurred, creating a nice effect.

[Above] is a long-exposure shot of a stream I took recently. It is technically not a long-exposure photograph, but a simulation; this image was actually generated from a video recording taken with an old iPod, which was then processed in software into a single image. (Forgive the poor quality, I don’t own a good camera. Nonetheless, this image demonstrates the desired effect.)

You can check out the technical details of how the Python script works here. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download Hipshot over on Google Code.

You might recognize the photograph above. Titled Valley Of The Shadow Of Death and snapped by British photographer Roger Fenton in 1855, it’s considered to be one of the oldest known photographs of warfare. Problem is, it might also be one of the oldest known examples of a staged photograph.Read more…

Earlier this year, we wrote about a new company called Fourandsix (pronounced “forensics”), a collaboration between a former Photoshop product manager and a professor who’s an expert in digital forensics. The goal of the new startup was to build powerful tools that would make detecting digital photo manipulation easy. Well, the first Fourandsix product is now available.

Called FourMatch, it’s an extension for Photoshop CS5/CS6 that “instantly distinguishes unmodified digital camera files from those that may have been edited.”Read more…